Random books

Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess (Paperback) by Barrett Seaman "On a crisp November Monday evening just past six-thirty, I arrived at the large, rambling cedar-shingled building on the outskirts of the University of California's..."

Seaman, a longtime reporter and editor at Time magazine, retired in 2001. A trustee at his alma mater, Hamilton College, since 1989, he became increasingly curious about how the residential college experience had changed since his student years in the 1960s. Choosing 12 colleges, among them Harvard, Berkeley, Duke, Stanford, and University of Wisconsin at Madison, Seaman spent two years living at colleges and investigating campus life. His findings will be utterly unsurprising to most parents, students, professors and administrators: today's students are overextended, isolated by technology, drink too much, study too little and engage in sexual experimentation that can lead—in combination with alcohol and other wrong choices—to depression, diseases and even date rape. How do today's residential campuses differ from those of Seaman's day? The author provides no comparisons, yet he seems highly alarmed by the changes he perceives. He is at his best detailing statistics, whether on campus drinking or emotional stresses placed on students; weakest when focusing on the influence of technology (he decries Instant Messaging and multitasking), the impact of sexuality and the conflicts caused by race. Seaman does recognize the need for college administrators and professors to be more engaged in student life/lives; this book is addressed primarily to them.

I've started to play Go

Last week I have started to play Go. I took a seat near one of the games in the mini-club here, at Condor/U.Wisc./Madison/WI/USA, and got immediately hooked. Go is atari, joseki, aji, fuseki, hane, and zillion others, with only 19x19 spaces to pus black and white stones, alternatively. And much more. Tim Cartwright pointed me to this wonderful discussion of Go books [ http://www.gobooks.info/bib-difficulty.html ], from which I quote "
I recommend any of the first seven books listed beneath here. (The other three are good, too, but for various reasons I don't recommend them as strongly.) Learn to Play Go, Vol. 1: A Master's Guide to the Ultimate Game is very well-written and clear, and has the advantage that it's part of a series, so once you're done with it, you can read the other books in the series. Its downside is that volume 1 covers less material than the other books mentioned here and costs more. Iwamoto's Go for Beginners is the book that I learned from; I recommend it happily. It and Matthews's Teach Yourself Go have lots of bang for the buck; so they're cheaper than the others and contain more material, but for some people the presentation may go by a bit too quickly. They're also more likely to be available in a general bookstore than any other good go book, though fortunately Learn to Play Go is also making inroads. Go! More Than a Game does a better job of presenting cultural information surrounding the game than any other introductory book. Cho's Go: A Complete Introduction to the Game is also quite good: it's about as cheap as Go for Beginners, but is easier to read and contains nice cultural information (though not as nice as Go! More Than a Game). You'll have a hard time finding it in a general bookstore, but specialty bookstores carry it, as do web bookstores. It had an earlier incarnation under the title The Magic of Go; there's no real difference between the two editions. And The Book of Go uses the capture game to introduce go, which some people might like.
"
About equipment: most European cities seem to have cheap Go equipment for sale. Try for instance http://www.samarkand.net/ (Janet Kim's web site) for better quality.

To conclude: with Go, life is never simple. If you argue that it's the same without it, then you've probably never played Go.

Grid traces

Apparently, our recent study ( A. Iosup, C. Dumitrescu, D.H.J. Epema, H. Li, L. Wolters, How are Real Grids Used? The Analysis of Four Grid Traces and Its Implications, The 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid), Barcelona, September 28-29, 2006 ) was well received by the Grid computing research community. One of the most important outcomes of this situation is that our work towards the Grid Workloads Archive (GWA) has made a nice and decided step forward.

As much of the research in grids today is made with simulations based on empirical workloads, the GWA is much needed. This is because years of theoretical and practical experience show that studies based on empirical workloads have little or even no relevance for the actual users -- a large-scale distributed system may behave much better than another under different workload assumptions (see the 1990s dispute on this between Eager, Liny, and Harchol-Balter; the two latter arguably have shown that preiously disconsidered migration mechanisms are actually extremely valuable for realistic workloads, while they behave poorly for specially constructed (empirical) workloads).

To conclude, mark the day of 28.Sep.2006 as the first community step towards the GWA, and implicictly towards rigurous workload preparation.

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

I was looking for a good Bash tutorial (I keep forgetting the spelling of the n-th undocumented feature of what some consider the woderful Bash). Here it is: "Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide,
An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting", by Mendel Cooper [ http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ ]. I have found the Arrays [ http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/arrays.html ] and the Loops [ http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/loops1.html ] sections particularly helpful.